The Death Mage that doesn't want a fourth time

154 Severed bonds

Volume 8: Conquering the Trial of Zakkart

Something was breathing heavily through its nose as it moved through a forest with no signs of life in it.

"Fuuuh! Fuuuh! Pafuooh!"

As if desiring some kind of scent, it inhaled the surrounding air aggressively and then exhaled, its nose letting out a noise that sounded like a trumpet.

"Fugafugofubuguh!"

Even so, perhaps unable to find the scent that it was looking for, the creature extended its nose and began pressing its nose against all of the objects near it.

Trees, the dirt, stones, everything that it could reach.

Of course, a creature capable of this would not be a human.

"S-sceee...nt..."

To be more precise, this creature had once been a human, but had transformed into something that was not a human.

It had the face of a man with clearly unattractive looks, with scars across its forehead and cheeks. There were no abnormalities with the shapes or number of eyes and nose on this face. Other than the scars, it was the face of a normal human man.

But the location of this face was abnormal. The face was attached to the tip of an enormous human nose, so large that a grown Titan man would not be able to wrap his arms around it.

"SCEEEEENT!" the creature, which couldn't be described as anything other than a nose monster, shrieked in a high-pitched voice as it began moving again in an angry manner.

There were several thick tentacles... no, noses, protruding from the root of the enormous nose. At a glance, these smaller noses looked like tentacles, but they were all noses like the trunks of elephants.

This nose monster, whose bizarre appearance would cause an ordinary person to lose their ability to speak out of fear for it, continued through the forest that had no signs of any creatures living in it. It seemed that the animals and monsters that would normally be present in the forest had fled out of fear for the ominous aura emitted by the monster.

At that moment, the wind blew – a cold, clear autumn wind with a touch of the winter to come.

At that moment, the nose monster's entire body froze. It quietly inhaled the scent of the wind.

"Aaah..."

The nose monster's man-shaped face twisted in joy. It had finally sniffed out the scent that it had been desiring.

The nose monster turned and began moving in a ferocious manner towards the north. It mowed down the trees and boulders in its way with its trunks, letting out a trumpeting noise in joy at being able to get even a little closer to the scent it desired.

But as the monster came out of the forest, someone stood in its way.

"Stop right there!"

"We came here because we thought there were some unnatural noises of destruction and cries coming from the forest, and it seems we were on the mark. It's helpful that those who are absorbed by a fragment are stupid, but I don't like them because there's no point in having a scout against them."

"Edgar, save the talk for later... Vega, the self-proclaimed treasure hunter, I assume? Can you understand my words?"

The Five-colored Blades, led by the S-class adventurer Heinz, were standing in front of the monster – what had become of the man called Vega.